Kubo | Hidden Worlds: The Films of LAIKA

Armature Test Video, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

Monkey's Fur, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

THE PUPPETS

The Art of Hair and Fur

Hair and fur present a particular challenge in stop-motion animation. They need to be stiff so animators can control them yet look like they move naturally in the film.

Every time Kubo’s facial expression changes, even the slightest amount, the hair in front of his face had to be removed for the animator to access; the same is true for Mother’s hair and for the front of Beetle’s helmet, known as “the flip”
Kubo’s hair is made from hair extensions with silicon combed through each strand. The hair was then dusted with colored powders for highlights
Mother’s ponytail contains 13 oz. of powdered metal in the strands; this helped give it weight and gravity, aiding the animator in moving it and giving it a more realistic feel
The printed hair around Monkey’s face is extremely fragile and prone to breakage. If broken hairs are found, they are painstakingly glued back, one at a time; if the tiny fragments are lost, substitutes must be harvested from pre-existing faces that have already been filmed.
Over eight square feet of fake fur was used to create 19 Monkey puppets
Monkey’s fur texture from the neck down was completely hand-trimmed, taking one hair and fur artist several days
On the Sisters’ wigs, about three dozen tiny black rubber bands are placed at the base of the ponytails to create more dynamic movement
243 pairs of Calvin Klein Hipster white underwear were dyed purple and used for Monkey's skin underneath her fur

Making Faces

Each one of the tens of thousands of faces made for the film requires hours of work to create.

Kubo has more unique smiling faces than all previous LAIKA movie protagonists combined
Once printed, all character faces go through a 10-step process to be ready for filming, including sanding, spray coats, magnetization, and hand-painting of tooth and lip gloss
A single face goes from 3D printer to soundstage in about four hours
Kubo has both the largest and smallest 3D-printed replacement faces for an animated feature
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- The largest are a series of double-scaled Kubo faces each measuring roughly 4.5 inches across, used for a close-up of a teardrop on his cheek

- The smallest was a tiny Monkey face measuring just half an inch across, for a shot when the Skeleton has her in its clutches
It took 117 individual face parts for Monkey to yawn, but the most individual face parts in a single shot was 408, when Kubo is being taught by Beetle how to use a bow

Moon Beast 3D printed mouths, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016

Film Still, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

Storytelling

Despite his tragic backstory, Kubo had more unique smiling faces than LAIKA’s other heroes combined, making him the happiest protagonist in any LAIKA film to date. His face underwent many different transitions during the film: from clean to covered in snow to soaking wet, and from a single scar to multiple scars, with and without dirt. Each time his expression changed even slightly; the front of Kubo’s hair had to be removed so an animator could access his face. The same was true of Kubo’s mother’s hair and the front flip of Beetle’s helmet.

Pushing Boundaries

LAIKA has significantly advanced the technology of replacement facial animation in stop-motion, going from 6,333 hand-painted faces for Coraline to 100,000 3D-color-printed faces for Kubo. This has enabled LAIKA animators to push the boundaries of character performance for the medium. The difference in facial expressions from one frame to the next can be extremely broad to tinier than a human hair’s width. Even the subtlest expression change requires a whole new printed face!

Kubo
- Unique mouth expressions: 11,007
- Unique brow expressions: 4,429
- Total faces Rapid Prototype printed: 23,187
- Over 48 million possible facial expressions
Monkey
- Unique mouth expressions: 8,171
- Unique brow expressions: 3,789
- Total faces Rapid Prototype printed: 15,581
- Over 30 million possible facial expressions
Beetle
- Unique mouth expressions: 6,168
- Unique brow expressions: 2,227
- Total faces Rapid Prototype printed: 10,545
- Over 13 million possible facial expressions

Film Still, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

Kubo and the Two Strings Behind the Scenes

Puppet Faces, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

Leaf Boat, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

EPIC BUILDS

Scale & Proportion

Stop-motion animators work with miniature worlds and puppets on tabletop sets that expand to cinematic proportions on the big screen. In Kubo and the Two Strings, everything was shrunken to approximately 1/6th human scale, meaning that a 9-inch-tall Kubo puppet would rise to 4 feet, 5 inches in the real world. Miniature scale allows puppets, sets, and even monsters to be fabricated as practical in-camera objects.

Kubo featured both the smallest and largest articulated puppets ever animated in a stop-film film, with Little Hanzo at 2 inches tall and the Giant Skeleton towering at 16 feet in height.

Problem Solving

Bringing 3 mythical monsters to life for Kubo and the Two Strings required collaborative problem-solving techniques that combined creative artistry with state-of-the-art technology. Taller than any animator and weighing 400 pounds, the Giant Skeleton puppet was rigged to a “hexa-pod” and controlled by a series of motion-control rigs.
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The Garden of Eyes Sea Monster, which was 11 feet tall and measured 30 inches in diameter, was animated using a bowling ball that was custom designed to be an extra-large trackball controller.
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The Moon Beast, LAIKA’s first 3D-printed puppet, required close collaboration between the Rapid Prototype, Rigging, and Visual Effects departments. If he were the same scale as Kubo, he would have been 17.6 feet long, which meant he had to be built at a smaller scale and composited into shots featuring the full-scale Kubo puppet.

The Garden of Eyes Sea Monster, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

Skeleton Puppet, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

Giant Skeleton, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

The Giant Skeleton

Two sizes of the Skeleton were made for the film
The full-scale puppet is the largest stop-motion puppet ever built, weighing 400 pounds and standing 16 feet tall with a 23-foot wingspan
The lower half and upper half of the large Skeleton had to be filmed separately, with most shots capturing the upper body/torso
For some scenes, a one-sixth-scale Skeleton was used; standing just over 2.5 feet tall, this is also among the largest stop-motion puppets ever made
The Skeleton was the first puppet to be rigged to a Hexapod, a motion control table that enables the torso to be moved on X-, Y- and Z-axis, as well as pan, tilt, and roll. It took 27 days to build the Hexapod.
The arms of the Skeleton were moved by via rigs suspended from the ceiling and counterweighted like an enormous marionette.
Each of the Skeleton's hands weighs 6 pounds
The elbow locks of the Skeleton, made from automobile brake pads, had to be replaced three times over the course of the shoot
Instead of the traditional ball joints used for stop-motion puppets, the arms and head were secured with clusters of magnets to provide maximum range
70 unique swords were made for the skull, and over 1,000 bones were used to make the armor for the torso

The Moon Beast

The Moon Beast was built at one-fifth scale and composited into shots with the full-scale Kubo puppet—had it been made full-scale, it would have been 17.6 feet long
Four Moon Beast puppets were made
There was a full-sized tail made for one scene and a full-sized hand made for another; the hand was over 3.5 feet long and was made of over 58 3D-printed parts
The Moon Beast is LAIKA’s first fully 3D-printed puppet
The puppet is made up of over 881 individual parts: 130 are color 3D printed and 751 are a combination of metal body, leg armature components, and internal dressing pieces
Instead of a traditional ball-and-socket armature, the spine of the Moon Beast consists of posable gooseneck tubing typically used for microphone stands and lamps

The Moon Beast, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

The costumes

Clothing and Armor

Six different materials are used as backings in Kubo’s sleeves so that they remain folded precisely
There are 1,412 hand-drilled holes in Kubo’s armor. For the 13 Kubo armored puppets made during production, the total number of hand-drilled holes is 18,356.
There are 176 individually shaped and laser-cut armor pieces on the Moon King’s armor chest plate
The Moon King’s leather shoulder pads were created by press-molding the leather in 3D-generated molds
There are thousands of tiny hexagons and triangles on the Moon King’s skirt, each one hand-cut out of a single sheet of laser-cut vinyl
There are over 2,000 laser-cut pieces of weighted lining in the kimono, enabling it to fold as needed and have gravity
Made from origami, Little Hanzo stands less than 2 inches tall, making him the shortest puppet ever animated in a LAIKA movie
Costume Designer Deborah Cook received a nomination for the film for a Costume Designers Guild Award, the only time a costume designer has ever been nominated for this prestigious award for an animated movie
Origami patterns are used in the sleeve design to ensure they hang in the same pattern no matter Kubo's arm position. Sheets of Tyvek, high-density polyethylene fiber material used in building construction, were crumpled and un-crumpled exactly 15 times to create the required flexibility.

Costume Design, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

3D-Printed Feathers, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

Re-Imaging Materials

To create the cloaks for the sinister Sisters in Kubo and the Two Strings, 861 laser-etched feathers were 3D-printed, each one a unique size and shape so they could slide over each other without catching. Each Sister’s cloak had a total of 481 different-shaped feathers. The Sisters’ design was inspired by Tomoe Gozen, a female samurai warrior (1157-1247), and the look of real-life female ninjas. Each Sister’s wig had approximately 37 black rubber bands at the base of the ponytail to enable it to swing around.

On Set, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

THE SHOOT

In a live-action film, a cinematographer records 24 or even 60 frames per second. A stop-motion animator at LAIKA records 3.31 seconds per week or 15.9 frames per day!

The film has 1,359 shots and 133,096 frames of animation—although the number of actual frames shot is higher because of the additional sequences
Production took 94 weeks
The estimated total number of hours worked was 1,149,015
2,592 breakfast burritos were eaten during filming

THE SETS

The Hall of Bones

The Hall encompasses 360 square feet and is covered with 380 clear resin tiles painted to look like jade. 200 gallons of clear resin was used to make all the 12 x 12-inch tiles.
It took approximately 75 minutes to hand-paint each tile in a four-step process
The lower two-thirds of the walls are physical; the visual effects department digitally extended the wall to its full height of 22 feet
The Hall of Bones main fortress building is 6 feet tall and 13 feet long, but only built up to the second level; the third story is a digital extension
The Hall rests on 192 aluminum legs made of nearly 600 feet of piping
The entire courtyard is about 660 square feet consisting of 500 resin tiles
There are 26 columns along each of the 20-foot walkways
Nearly 1000 feet of horizontal wood trim, or 300 three-foot pieces, was applied
The 150 pieces of bamboo stalk are made of resin with steel rod armatures

Hall of Bones, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

The Garden of Eyes Concept Art, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

The Garden of Eyes

There was actually only one single-eyed puppet in the Garden
The puppet stands 11 feet tall, with the eye measuring 30 inches in diameter, and is fully computer motion-controlled, with the option of pre-programming its performance
The animators worked from a remote interface consisting of an array of encoders and a track ball made from hacked computer mice and a bowling ball
It took 42 independent data channels and motors to produce each frame of animation
The tentacles were cable-driven and pre-programmed, producing cyclical gesticulations
The eyes’ moiré effect was achieved by projecting light through counter-rotating rippled glass bowls onto the inside of the acrylic eyeball

The Leaf Boat

Two full boats and one broken boat were made
The boat is 12 feet long, 14 feet high, and 4.5 feet wide; the mast is 10 feet tall
It took three carpenters, four landscape artists, four model makers, two scenic artists, two metal fabricators, and two machinists about four months to complete the boat(s)
The boat hull and deck are made of plywood and layered with bendable plywood skin to approximate folds
The boat was made in nine sections to provide access for animators and camera
The underlying metal frame, consisting of laser-cut bulkheads and rectangular steel tubing, was made in five sections that could be removed for camera and animator access, then reattached
The bow is made of cut steel that was laser perforated to create bend lines so that it folded like origami
There are six versions of the sail: Hero Wet, Hero Dry, Billowing, Furled, Tear-Away, and Torn
All except the Furled sail were rigged to move, flutter, and/or flap
The surface of the boat is covered with Canson Colorline paper laser-cut into nearly 250,000 leaves, which took about 100 hours to attach
During filming, the boat was mounted to either a Duopod (two movement axis) or Hexapod (six movement axis) motion-control table
The Leaf Boat sequence took 19 months to shoot

The Leaf Boat, Kubo and the Two Strings, 2016.

The DESIGN

THE PUPPETS

EPIC BUILDS

The costumes

THE SHOOT

THE SETS